“Absolutely.”
“She sounds pretty extraordinary from what I’ve read,” she says.
“We’ve gotten a lot of emails and tweets and messages about our last show,” Daniel is saying. “Specifically, how sort of creepy it is that two men, and in the case of our last show, three, are talking about a young woman’s mental state, what she might have been thinking or why she might have done certain things.”
“Yes,” Merrick says, “and we’ve heard you. We didn’t mean to be as obtuse as we seemed.”
“And early on we did have on one of Randa’s friends from UWF,” Daniel adds, “and . . . the thing is . . . we’ve invited a lot of other women on the show . . . and gotten a lot of no’s.”
“And the show is new,” Merrick says. “We’re just getting started.”
“Yes. But . . . we realize now we shouldn’t just be two guys talking about a young woman and her mysterious disappearance.”
“By far the most compelling and convincing argument was made by Nancy Drury on her Nancy Drury Woman Detective blog,” Merrick says.
“Nancy expressed what so many were,” Daniel says, “but did it in a masterful way. She’s a good writer and thinker. She didn’t trash us. Just laid out her argument . . . respectfully and . . . like I said . . . masterfully.”
“So we asked Nancy to join us on the show today. Welcome Nancy. Nice to have you.”
“Thanks for having me on,” she says.
“I have to say,” Daniel says, “I see Merrick and myself as pretty sensitive, aware, non-sexist guys, but until we started getting all the messages . . . it didn’t really occur to me how stupid we were being.”
“It was an epic fail on our part,” Merrick says, “but one we’re planning to remedy right now. Because . . . we’ve asked Nancy to be a regular contributor to our show. Sometimes she’ll be on the show, but she’ll always be in the background having input and keeping an eye on what we’re doing.”
“We should say that Nancy is an accomplished true crime blogger and podcaster herself,” Daniel says, “and even did a whole show dedicated to the Randa Raffield case a while back. Why don’t we start with you telling us a little about yourself, Nancy.”
“Okay. Well, I have a background in communications and I’ve always been interested in true crime, real-life mysteries, and the criminal justice system, but it wasn’t until it personally hit home that I began to blog about it. My husband was the victim of a hit-and-run. I started all this as a way to deal with that and search for the person who effectively ended his life. He’s a quadriplegic who requires near constant care with no quality of life at all.”
“Oh my God,” Daniel says. “We’re so sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you. It happened quite a while ago and we’ve adjusted to a new way of life. I haven’t found out who hit him, but working on it has led me to many other unsolved cases. It’s staggering and disheartening how many unsolved cases there are out there. It’s why I appreciate what you guys are doing. When I wrote what I did, I was doing so out of love for your show and the desire for it to be even better. I hope I wasn’t overcritical and I certainly wasn’t looking to . . . join the show.”
“We had to beg her,” Merrick says.
“Nancy has a lot on her and is doing this as a favor to us and as a gift to Randa and her family,” Daniel says. “And we appreciate her so much for doing it.”
“And you weren’t overcritical at all on your blog about us,” Merrick says. “Obviously, we needed to hear it. We needed a female perspective.”
“And now we have it,” Daniel says.
“It’s important to say that I don’t speak for women,” Nancy says. “I don’t speak for Randa. I don’t speak for women in general. I can’t. I can only speak from my perspective, which happens to be a female of a certain age who has been touched by tragedy and true crime.”
“Well said,” Daniel says. “You’re making our show better already.”
“Some would say it couldn’t have gotten any worse,” Merrick says.
The two men laugh, but Nancy, who clearly knows that Merrick is joking, takes the opportunity again to say what a fine job they’ve been doing.
“So before we move on today,” Merrick says, “Nancy, is there anything you wanted to address that was said on our last show?”
“I’m sure we’ll cover most of it as we move forward,” she says, “but . . . just that . . . the pressures on young women in the world are enormous. Sometimes to the point of being crushing. And however Randa dealt with them or whatever she did to cope is far more complicated than we can begin to understand. Randa, like all of us, was an extremely complex human being. Being a human being is difficult enough, but being a female human being . . . It’s like the quote about Ginger Rogers. Fred Astaire was great, but she did everything he did—except backward and in heels.”
14
Seaside, the unincorporated master-planned community west of Panama City along scenic 30A, is part of New Florida. Pottersville, Wewahitchka, and other small Panhandle towns are part of Old Florida. Certain cities—Tallahassee, Pensacola, Jacksonville, Panama City—have pockets of both Old and New Florida.
I’m part of and partial to Old Florida.
I have a love-hate relationship with most of New Florida.
The homes along the various master-planned communities of 30A are stylish in a uniform way, but are far too expensive for most Floridians and nearly all natives. They are the second homes and exclusive vacation getaways of the wealthiest of Atlanta, Nashville, Birmingham.
Seaside was one of the first planned communities to be designed using the principals of new urbanism and includes the look of an updated old beach town with wooden cottages—though there’s nothing old about it. The small town became world-famous when the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show was filmed there.
Everything in this picture-perfect postcard of a small seaside town is soft and bright pastel colors of wooden beach cottages with tin roofs, framed mostly in white, surrounded by white wooden picket fences, pergolas, and gazebos.
The homes, which show the influence of Victorian and Carpenter Gothic and the antebellum South, all have small native yards and front porches filled with wooden Adirondack chairs, and are connected by a web of sand trail footpaths.
Among the many things to recommend Seaside are the incredible independent bookstore, Sundog Books, and the record store above it, Central Square Records—both of which I hope to visit before I leave if I can.
Jerry Raffield is one of the few native Floridians who can afford to live in Seaside and chooses to.
He’s a roundish, laid-back, soft-spoken man with short curly hair, deeply tanned, heavily lined skin, small, sad blue eyes, and a smoker’s voice—though there’s no evidence on him or in his house that he smokes.
We are in his study—a beachy modern book room and office where he meets with his counseling clients.
“Thank you for coming, Detective Jordan,” he says. “I really appreciate it.”
The sound of his voice and the rhythm of his phrasing is hypnotic, and I get the sense that he is very good at what he does.
“Is there news?” he asks. “About my daughter, I mean. Have you finally found her?”
“No sir. I’m sorry, but I am here because we’re devoting more resources to finding her. We have a new sheriff and she’s assigned the case to me. I’m looking at it with fresh eyes . . . There’s a lot of public interest in the case, lots of amateur detectives working it right now. Hopefully additional evidence will turn up and . . .”
“I’ve always been . . . surprised by the . . . attention Randa’s disappearance has received from the public. I’m not sure exactly . . . but my suspicion is that it’s not a net gain for us. But if any of the . . . bloggers or podcasters or . . . turn up anything that helps us find her . . . I’ll gladly amend my view.”
The room is filled with pictures—on his desk, on the walls, on the shelves—of Randa frozen in time, never a
ging past a certain point, the beneficent bloom of youth bright upon her smile-crinkled face.
“You’ve had a lot of time to think about Randa’s disappearance now,” I say. “Has anything occurred to you that maybe didn’t at the time you were first interviewed?”
“Lots, I’m sure,” he says. “I’ll have to think about it.”
“Would you mind starting by just telling me about your daughter?” I say.
His small eyes glisten and he clears his throat.
“She . . . was . . . a . . . rare combination of tough and kind. She wasn’t a soft sentimentalist but she’d do anything she could to help alleviate the suffering of others—often with some of the very things she herself was suffering from.”
“Can you give me an example?”
He nods. “Sure. Randa suffered from PTSD. She led a PTSD group on campus. She knew what it was like to deal with the noonday demon of depression and even experience the desire for self-harm and . . . she volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline. But she wasn’t just involved in the personal. She was political too. She participated in protests against the Iraq war. In fact . . . she was meant to be at one the night she went missing.”
“Any idea why she wasn’t?” I ask. “Or where she might have been headed?”
He shakes his head. “Second only to her disappearance itself, I find that the most bewildering. I just can’t imagine what she was doing, where she was going.”
“You said she suffered from PTSD,” I say. “What . . . brought that on?”
“Her mom’s drug-addicted, narcissistic sister has had a parade of bad men in and out of her bed and life over the years. But back then . . . we didn’t realize just how bad she was, and she had been with the same guy for several years. We didn’t find out until much later—long after he was gone—but he . . . repeatedly sexually assaulted Randa when she was a little girl. We were so ignorant of what was going on. They were our neighbors and they babysat for us all the time. He told her if she ever told anyone, he’d kill us. Told her how he’d do it in vivid detail. He took this sweet, kind, innocent child . . . and violated and brutalized her . . . When we found out, we got her medical and psychological care and treatment, of course, but the damage was done. I . . . I . . . didn’t protect her . . . my little girl . . . my angel. I . . . bought a gun. The first one I ever owned in my life. I searched for him. I was . . . going to . . . kill him. I swear to God I was. But I could never find him.”
It explains so much about Randa—the obsession and control, the cutting and sexually acting out.
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“Yeah, well . . . maybe you can find him.”
“What’s his name?”
“He went by Bill,” he says. “Bill Lee, but . . . that wasn’t his real name.”
I write his name down in my pad and nod. “I’ll find him.”
“God, I wish you would.”
“I will.”
He nods and looks away, his gaze coming to rest on a picture of Randa hanging on the wall behind his desk.
“She was so . . . such a good, strong person . . . in spite of what happened to her. She was damaged, wounded . . . but she never gave up—on getting better or having the life she wanted.”
He begins to cry softly.
“It’s been almost twelve years,” he says. “It could be twenty or fifty or a hundred . . . You never get over the death of a child. Never. I will never get over the . . . her absence in my life, in the world.”
“What . . . do you think happened to her?” I ask.
“I think for a lot of reasons . . . she just got . . . it all got to be too much for her to . . . that she finally had enough and . . . did what she had to do to stop the . . . all of it.”
15
The soft white sand leads down to the glasslike green Gulf, beyond which the horizon is a patchy modern painting of pastel pink, orange, and purple.
The tranquil beach at sunset is mostly empty, mostly quiet, completely transcendent.
“I think my daughter committed suicide and I think it’s my fault,” Jerry says.
We are looking at the beach from his backyard, which is so close as to be part of it.
Not far down from us the rooftop bar of Bud and Alley’s, the restaurant named after Seaside’s founder’s dog and the restaurant’s owner’s cat, is loud with laughter, conversation, drinking, and people generally having a good time.
I wonder if it’s difficult for Jerry to live here in this picturesque place of perpetual vacation. How dissonant the idyllic surroundings of paradise must be to a broken, sad, guilt-ridden, daughterless father.
“Why do you say that?” I ask.
“Something new I was trying at the time,” he says, still gazing out at the sun sinking into the Gulf. “Tough love. I was taking a new approach with her. Confronting her about some of her risky behaviors, saying no to some of her requests, insisting that she get back in counseling. I think I pushed too hard. Or changed too abruptly. I think I drove her to . . . whatever she was doing, whatever she ultimately did.”
If she killed herself, where is the body?
I make a mental note to ask Reggie about us organizing another search of Panther Swamp.
“You really think your attempts at helping her pushed her over the edge?” I ask. “Was she that close to the edge to begin with?”
He shrugs. “Obviously I didn’t think so.”
“If you step back and look at it as a psychologist and not a father,” I say, “do you reach the same conclusion?”
He still doesn’t look away from the western horizon, just wipes tears from his eyes.
“Not sure. Probably not.”
If I am able to find out what happened to Randa, depending on what that is exactly, the burden of Jerry’s guilt might be lifted a bit.
We are quiet a while.
“And you can’t think of anywhere she might have been headed?” I ask. “Family member or friend who lives down that way—or even as far as Apalach, Carrabelle, or Tallahassee?”
He shakes his head.
“Maybe somewhere she read about, some place y’all vacationed when she was a kid.”
“I’ve thought and thought,” he says, continuing to shake his head. “Just can’t come up with anything.”
“What if she didn’t harm herself,” I say, “what if a very bad man didn’t happen by just at the right moment, what would you think happened to her? Would she have run away? Vanished to restart her life somewhere in anonymity?”
“I don’t think so,” he says, looking at me again. “She didn’t really have a flight response, only fight. And I really, really don’t think she’d do that to her mom or me.”
“Then what?” I ask. “If she didn’t harm herself, if she didn’t intentionally disappear on her own, and if she wasn’t happened upon by a killer of some sort, then what?”
“I always liked her boyfriend,” he says. “Thought he was . . . extremely patient and understanding with Randa.”
“Yeah?”
“But . . . I don’t know . . . things have come out since she . . . disappeared. I don’t know . . . I’m . . . I’ve been rethinking some things about him.”
“We’ll definitely be looking at him again,” I say.
“He proposed on New Year’s Eve at a big event in Pensacola. Local news captured it. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Every time her case is reported on, they show that same clip over and over. She said yes at the time, but one of her friends said it was just to keep from causing a scene or embarrassing him, that she had no intention of marrying him. What if she told him shortly before she went missing? Or what if he found out about the other guys she was sleeping with? I don’t know. I’m not trying to point the finger at him. I know what that’s like. So many crazies online say I killed her. Or me and her mom, that we’re secretly still together, but live separately to throw everyone off the scent of our murderous guilt. There’s been . . . so much craziness . . . I don’t want to add to it, but .
. . you asked what else might have happened to her. I wouldn’t say this to anybody else—not the media or friends and family. Just the police.”
I nod. “I understand. Thanks.”
We are quiet again as the day turns to dusk.
“I wanted to ask you about the life insurance policy on Randa and what happened with petitioning the court to declare her dead.”
He shakes his head. “What an unbelievable mess. There are people online who think I killed my daughter for insurance money. They say us having a policy on her is suspicious, but . . . my nephew was new in the insurance business and we bought policies for all three of us. It was as simple and innocent as that. They were set up as automatic withdrawals from one of our old accounts. I had forgotten we even had it. I didn’t want the damn money. And I wasn’t going to declare my daughter dead. We either find her or she’s still alive to me, or the hope of her being alive is—at least in some small way. Lynn, my ex-wife, and I don’t really talk, but I’m sure she feels the same way. It was her nutjob, narcissistic sister whose actions led to Randa being so traumatized in the first place who petitioned the court. She’s always borrowing money from Lynn—or was. She thought she was going to get her hands on that money, but . . . after she did what she did, Lynn cut her off for good. Hasn’t spoken to her since, as far as I know. Lynn and I both agreed to put up every dime of the insurance money as a reward for whoever finds our Randa.”
16
When I get home I find Anna on our back porch, glass of wine in hand, listening to the night, looking at the moon and the stars.
Her face lights up when she sees me—and then again when she sees the bags in my hand.
“You brought me something from Sundog?” she says.
“And Central Square Records.”
“You coming home to me was gift enough. This is like Christmas.”
COLD BLOOD (a John Jordan Mystery Book 13) Page 7
